Re: XML Guidelines -06

[Tim Bray <tbray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hollenbeck, Scott wrote:
> Marshall, Larry, and I recently received feedback from Ned Freed, the IETF
> area director tagged with doing the initial review of our XML guidelines
> draft.  I've updated the document to incorporate Ned's comments and others
> received for -05.  With Ned's comments addressed, an IETF last call should
> happen soon.  The updated document can be found here:
>
> http://www.imc.org/ietf-xml-use/index.html

An outstanding piece of work.  These comments are almost all tiny 
editorial nits.

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4.4, 2nd-last paragraph says "Note that the XML Declaration is not part 
of the XML document's Information Set."  True, but the character 
encoding is in the IS, and it might have come from the XML Declaration.

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4.7, bullet list; on what basis do DTDs & XML Schema each get their own 
bullet, while all the rest, regardless of their de jure/de facto status, 
are crammed into the third?

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4.9, 2nd para says "attributes are generally intended to contain 
meta-data that describes the value of the element"

- I disagree mildly with the assertion; attributes, as this section 
points out in gory detail, can be used for pretty well anything and 
you'd be hard-put to find any normative text to back up the assertion of 
general intent
- I disagree strongly with the use of 'value'.  The term "value of an 
element" is one I've not seen elsewhere and it's kind of confusing.  The 
metadata could be about the element itself, or about the content of the 
element, or about another attribute, or (contradicting the assertion) 
about a monastery in Bhutan.  I think it should just say "metadata about 
the element", if you really must keep this claim.

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4.11 Incremental Processing

I was unable to understand this section or imagine the situation it 
describes; maybe it would benefit from an example scenario?

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4.15 2nd last para

Once again, the draft discusses the "value" of an element.  In this 
case, the discussion concerns the *content* of the element and should 
use that term.  Might be worthwhile to do an end-to-end grep for this 
usage of the word "value".

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5.1 2nd para

Last sentence begins "External parsed entities encoded in UTF-16..." 
You really have to know XML pretty well to realise that this implies 
that since XML documents are formally external parsed entities they thus 
have the UTF16/BOM requirement.  Hm... maybe say "documents and external 
parsed entities" - formally redundant, but much more obvious.